The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership

The Female Advantage was the first book to focus on what women had to contribute as leaders rather than how they needed to change and adapt.

Published in 1990 and continuously in print ever since, The Female Advantage has been called “a classic” by Thinkers50, the world’s premier resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing management ideas.

Here’s what Sally has to say about this extraordinarily influential book:

“I wrote The Female Advantage because I felt women were getting a lot of bad advice. We were being urged by both popular and academic writers, as well as corporate leaders and trainers, to leave our values at home and conform to what we found in the workplace. To adapt and fit in rather than trying to change things. Somehow, everyone assumed that one half the human race could enter the workforce without changing how people were led and managed.

“I didn’t buy it. I’d worked as in corporate communications, and knew firsthand how companies were struggling to adapt to forces that were reshaping organizations. And I knew that women, as outsiders to the mainstream business environment, had fresh perspectives about what needed to change. I didn’t want to see an historic opportunity squandered because women’s strategic abilities were routinely dismissed. So I decided to do something about it.

I began by interviewing about 80 high-profile women entrepreneurs as well as women who had succeeded in the corporate world.

“Drawing upon what I learned, I then did diary studies of four of successful leaders. I chose women who were skilled at articulating why they managed and led as they did. Women who were comfortable being women rather than trying to imitate men. These interviews form the core of The Female Advantage.

“I shadowed these women, nothing how they managed their time, built their schedules, dealt with subordinates, ran meetings, answered their mail. In one case, I even witnessed how one of them fired an employee. In the process, I discovered that management is like a good novel. What’s memorable and revealing lies in the details.

My original purpose in writing The Female Advantage was to influence organizations, so they could understand how to better value women.

“But women turned out to be the chief audience. From the day the book was published, they have told me: ‘This book validates how I do things. And it shows me that I have a leadership style.

“Men also got the message. My first fan letter I got was from General Perry Smith, who had made The Female Advantage required reading at the National College of War. David Gergen used the book in his leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And leadership legend Henry Mintzberg told me it persuaded him to start studying the leadership style of nurses.

“These men recognized early what has now become vividly apparent: that women play a key role in how we define excellence in leadership. And in persuading organizations become less hierarchical and more inclusive.”